First Run Features (Firm)
21) Playing Dead
Description
Jean, a 40-year-old unemployed actor, has hit rock bottom. Insufferably clueless and egotistical, his over-the-top "method" acting and high-maintenance personality have gotten him fired from countless jobs. At the unemployment office, his counselor sets him up with a rather odd job: helping the police reconstruct crime scenes by standing in for the dead victim. Jean's obsession for detail impresses the beautiful chief investigator, allowing him to...
22) Magical Girl
Description
One of the breakout hits of Spain's burgeoning low-budget filmmaking scene, Carlos Vermut's debut, Diamond Flash, instantly established the young filmmaker as a deft practitioner of the thriller genre. Vermut's follow-up, Magical Girl, employs a classic noir premise, taking his exploration of the darkest side of human nature to exhilarating new extremes. Luis (Luis Bermejo) is desperate to fulfill his terminally ill daughter's last wish: to own the...
23) Dance for Camera
Description
Dance for Camera presents six films that are among the most outstanding examples of a new film genre that merges dance and film. Selected from festivals in Europe and North America, and winners of over 17 international awards, these films present an array of humor, drama, beauty and rhythm not usually seen on film or stage made by young emerging artists from around the world.
Description
Talented art student Angelique is madly in love with Loic, a married cardiologist whose wife is expecting their first child. Things take a dangerous turn as Angelique grows less discreet in her affections and her attempts to separate the couple fail. Halfway through, this black comedy takes a dramatic turn and the film reverses perspective, showing the preceding events from Loic's (wildly different) point-of-view.
Description
Charlotte and Max live with their young son in Brussels. When Max finds out Charlotte has been taking some of her male patients to a rented apartment, their relationship is put to the test. Charlotte agrees to go to therapy and is forced to stop working as a doctor. When they move to India because of his work, both seem happy again, at least initially. For it appears that their past has not been completely laid to rest...Warning: This film contains...
26) Backyard
Description
The result of McElwee turning his camera on his family and their neighbors, the film is a humorous and poignant look at odd moments in a genteel Southern town.
27) Deserted Station
Description
In this lyrical and intimately nuanced story conceived by Abbas Kiarostami and starring Leila Hatami, a photographer and his young wife are stranded in a remote Iranian village after their car breaks down. The only adult inhabitant leaves with the photographer to find help, while the woman takes over the duties of teaching the village children - whose parents are nowhere to be found.
28) Methadonia
Description
Methadonia is the borderland between high and straight, where recovering heroin addicts on methadone "maintenance" exist. Passing the time on benzos and other prescription drugs that enhance the methadone, addicts find themselves in Methadonia for years, or decades. Selected for the prestigious New York Film Festival and featured on HBO, this unflinching, intimate film reveals the culture of addiction through the eyes and lives of men and women stuck...
29) Before Stonewall
Description
In 1969 the police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City's Greenwich Village, leading to three nights of rioting by the city's gay community. With this outpouring of courage and unity the Gay Liberation Movement had begun. BEFORE STONEWALL pries open the closet door--setting free the dramatic story of the sometimes horrifying public and private existences experienced by gay and lesbian Americans since the 1920s. Revealing and often...
30) German and Jews
Description
Today, Europe's fastest growing Jewish population is in Berlin.. Germany is considered one of the most democratic societies in the world, assuming the position of moral leader in Europe as it embraces hundreds of thousands of refugees. None of these developments could have been imagined in 1945. Through personal stories Germans & Jews explores the country’s transformation from silence about the Holocaust to facing it head on. Unexpectedly, a nuanced...
31) Kira's Reason
Description
Enjoying life in their mid-thirties, Kira and her husband Mads have a large house and two wonderful children. Their world is perfectly secure and comfortable until Kira develops a psychiatric disorder, which eventually commits her to a hospital. On being discharged, Kira's sole desire is to return to the normality of her previous life and fulfill her role as a good wife and mother. But, as she struggles to maintain equilibrium, she discovers Mads...
32) Quest
Description
This New York Times Critics' Pick, filmed with vérité intimacy for nearly a decade, is a moving portrait of the Rainey family living in North Philadelphia. Beginning at the dawn of the Obama presidency, Christopher "Quest" Rainey, and his wife, Christine'a "Ma Quest" raise a family while nurturing a community of hip hop artists in their home music studio. It's a safe space where all are welcome, but this creative sanctuary can't always shield them...
33) We Monsters
Description
A husband and wife struggle with their consciences after they try to conceal a terrible crime committed by their teenage daughter, in this riveting suspense drama from German director Sebastian Ko.. We would do anything to protect our children — it's one of our most deeply ingrained instincts. But what if your child did something unspeakable? German director Sebastian Ko poses this question with a thriller that's riveting in its suspense and unnerving...
Description
Provocative and bracing, Unborn in the USA provides a riveting look into the deep secrets and deep pockets of the pro-life movement. Traveling across 35 states, the filmmakers are granted unprecedented access to pro-life groups, movement icons, fund-raising machines, and even into classes where university students are being groomed to carry empathetic, pro-life messages to campuses around the country. More than 70 exclusive interviews are interwoven...
35) Secret Society
Description
Secret Society tells the story of Daisy, twenty years old and plump as a dumpling, and her adoring (and unemployed) husband Ken. Struggling financially, Daisy finds a job in a canning factory where she notices that her boss Marlene, radiant and heavy-set, grants special privileges to a group of equally chubby female factory workers. Soon Daisy learns that the women are part of a "secret society" of sumo wrestlers who are gaining strength and self-confidence...
36) Roman de Gare
Description
Judith Ralitzer, novelist and femme fatale, is seeking characters for her next best-seller. Meanwhile a serial killer has just escaped from a high security prison. Their paths are about to cross in Claude Lelouch's tricky thriller, which features a number of characters and a timeline that skips back and forth, keeping the audience guessing
Description
Simply and eloquently, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz explains how the world's economy works. Drawing not only from his academic expertise but also from time spent on the ground in countries around the world, Stiglitz offers fresh thinking about the questions and challenges facing all of us - from well-off Americans to those mired in Third World poverty. This five part series will appeal to experts and non-experts alike, as Stiglitz's...
Description
Charismatic cleric Abdul Aziz Ghazi, an ISIS supporter and Taliban ally, is waging jihad against the Pakistani state. His dream is to impose a strict version of Shariah law throughout the country, as a model for the world. A flashpoint in Aziz's holy war took place in 2007, when the government leveled his flagship mosque to the ground, killing his mother, brother, only son and 150 students. With unprecedented access, Among the Believers follows Aziz...
Description
A look into the complex and contradictory personality of Yossef Nachmani, the man largely responsible for the first Zionist settlements in the Galilee. As director of the Jewish National Fund office in the Galilee, Nachmani acquired as much land from Arabs as possible to establish Jewish settlements upon it. The film focuses on events in Tiberius, Nachmani's hometown, a mixed community where Arabs and Jews coexisted harmoniously. Nachmani left behind...
Description
Simply and eloquently, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz explains how the world's economy works. Drawing not only from his academic expertise but also from time spent on the ground in countries around the world, Stiglitz offers fresh thinking about the questions and challenges facing all of us - from well-off Americans to those mired in Third World poverty. This five part series will appeal to experts and non-experts alike, as Stiglitz's...